Saturday's lone NCAA basketball game featuring two top 25 teams, No. 9 Michigan State (20-4, 8-3 Big Ten) and No. 12 Indiana (20-4, 9-2), has both lost a little luster and become more interesting at the same time.
First off, the bad news: Both teams lost Big Ten games earlier this week, Michigan State falling at Purdue on Tuesday in a game the Spartans never really had much chance to win, and Indiana at home to Wisconsin on Wednesday on a fluke 3-pointer by the Badgers with seconds remaining.
Michigan State simply must win this game to have any hopes of winning the Big Ten regular-season title, as MSU currently is 2.5 games behind Purdue. In addition, the Spartans need to show something on the road. They are just 2-3 on the road in the Big Ten, with those two victories coming over patsies Northwestern and Minnesota. And they've lost at Iowa at Penn State, which is inexcusable.
This team is simply not the same away from East Lansing, and it shows in its offense: The Spartans average 57.3 ppg in their losses compared with their 73.0 ppg season average. And you need look no further than Big Ten Preseason Player of the Year Drew Neitzel. The senior guard was just 1-for-7 from the field against Purdue and is just 7-for-31 (22.6 percent) in the Spartans' three most recent losses.
And his defense will be key in this game, as he will mostly be matched up against Indiana super-freshman Eric Gordon, who is the leading scorer in the Big Ten at 21.4 points per game and is shooting .411 from behind the arc, hitting 60 three-pointers. However, Gordon has struggled lately, shooting 14-of-40 (35 percent) overall in the past three games.
Indiana, 10-2 at home, will count heavily on Gordon and senior D.J. White, who is Indiana's second-leading scorer (17.6 ppg) and the Big Ten's leading rebounder (10.6). He has 15 double-doubles and leads the Big Ten in shooting (62.4 percent).The intrigue in this game comes from the Indiana bench and coach Kelvin Sampson, whom the NCAA reported this week had committed major recruiting violations in contacting recruits, much as he did as Oklahoma's head coach. Sampson already had been docked $500,000 by IU and had language written into his contract because of those infractions when he was hired. Indiana announced Friday that it would order further research into the NCAA report, which also said Sampson provided false and misleading information to both the school and investigators.
As of Friday, Sampson will continue to coach the team during this investigation, and the Indiana athletic director will announce a decision within days on Sampson's future. However, ESPN reported that Sampson is only coaching the Hoosiers now on a "game-by-game" basis, and several other media outlets have indicated it's just a matter of time before Sampson is fired.
Yet neither the coach nor his team is hoping to let this affect the Hoosiers on the court.
"Michigan State is coming off a tough loss to a really, really good team. And we are coming off a tough loss. It is a really important game for both teams," Sampson said, trying to avoid anything non-basketball.
White said the distractions surrounding the program will not affect the team's performance on the court.
"Nothing outside's affected the team," White said. "We're a family, we stick together through whatever.”
It will be interesting to see whether this drives to Hoosiers to one of their best efforts of the season (which I think will happen) or begins to derail their once-promising season.
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